Books
FITZGERALD AND HIS BRETHREN
C
OMPLETE CANDOR
in autobiography is very rare, for two reasons:
because of the pride ·or inhibition or self-delusion of the man, or
because of the dramatizing and myth-making faculty of the artist, even
when dealing with himself. There is very little of the former in this
remarkably interesting collection of the fragmentary autobiography of
Scott Fitzgerald*; there is some of the latter. There is also the discretion
of the editor, whose concern for the living has turned a lot of the proper
names into asterisks and evidently deleted a good deal more. Nevertheless
the impression of a desperate effort at self-disclosure is one of the most
striking things about this book. With the general wreck of his self-confi-'
dence, pride in his honesty with himself seems to have been the one con–
cession Fitzgerald made to his vanity.
Many fascinating thingJ emerge under this honorable scrutiny, and
many of them have already been noticed by reviewers for the weeklies.
What interests me most is the curious likeness uncovered between Fitz–
gerald and his fictional brethren-not. necessarily in circumstances, but
in a kind of basic underlying sensibility. The root of this lay, I should
think, in a queer conflict in Fitzgerald himself: the conflict between
Fitzgerald the snob and the worshiper of dazzle, and Fitzgerald the
judge and the moralist.
Fitzgerald's liking for rich company has often enough been noted;
but the sense in which it is basic in him, -the sense in which wealth and
glitter and the arrogance of position are almost his only symbols
fo~
earthly beatitude has been put bluntly by only one critic I know about–
by Charles Weir in an article called
An Invite with Gilded Edges
in the
Virginia Quarterly.
Certainly Fitzgerald put it bluntly enough himself:
great animal magnetism and money, he says in one of his notes, are the
top things. In practice those among his characters who have great ani–
mal magnetism also either have, or get, money. There is probably no
writer of our time whose imagery of the desirable is more consistently
in terms of wealth, of diamonds, of pure material glitter. "Her voice is
full of money," says Gatsby of Daisy, thereby defining more than the
source of his own fascination.
*
THE CRACK-UP.
With other Uncollected Pieces, Note-Books and Unpublished
Letters.
By F. Scott Fitzgerald. Edited by Edmund Wilson. New Directions.
$3.50.
